Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

news.ycombinator.com

1–10 of 150 posts

Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#1
Brian here - I am one of the creators of Doppler and I’m pumped (and kinda nervous!) to share it with HN.

Doppler is an easy way to manage and share environment variables and secrets -- things like API keys, database credentials, feature flags, and configuration like a port or a hostname. We’ve heard it's “GitHub for secrets”.

While working at Uber and small startups, managing app config via env vars really sucked. Simple options like .env files were a nightmare to keep updated. Enterprise tools like HashiCorp Vault and AWS Parameter Store felt like we were stuck using FTP instead of Dropbox!

For the past 2 years, we’ve been heads-down building a secrets manager we actually want to use. For our customers, it's now their central source of truth for secrets and app configuration. They use Doppler to quickly organize and sync secrets with teammates and across infra, from local to prod on every stack. It has the features you'd want in a secrets manager, like sharing, audit logs, versioning, and integrations with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Heroku, Docker, Netlify, Laravel Forge, etc.).

We’re deeply committed to strong security controls and highly available infra. Best-practices like data tokenization, security driven design, and external pentests help keep us secure: https://doppler.com/security. And fully managed encrypted fallbacks in your infra means your secrets are always available, even in the rare case we aren’t.

To support our community, we’re committed to offering a community plan that's free forever for unlimited users. Paid plans start at $6/seat/month.

For visual learners like me, here's a 4-min video of us installing Doppler: https://vimeo.com/447918575.

Take a look if you're curious: https://doppler.com. Let us know what you think!

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#3
Why would someone use this over Vault or SOPS? Your (somewhat condescending) "stuck using FTP instead of Dropbox" is a very poor characterization. I think you've entered into a very busy space without bringing anything new to the table.

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#4
Congrats on the launch!

This space is definitely evolving with how many environment configs and creds teams have to maintain for all their environments and services.

I’m only familiar with Secrets Manager and Parameter Store and will check this out. Unfortunately, our customers are not going to be early adopters of this service but if it does the job well, this is something I can try and recommend them in future.

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#5

Why would someone use this over Vault or SOPS? Your (somewhat condescending) "stuck using FTP instead of Dropbox" is a very poor characterization. I think you've entered into a very busy space without bringing anything new to the table.

I can see why you might think that at first glance, but I'd encourage you to try out Doppler. No secrets manager offers the flexibility and incredible ease of use that we do. I'm not going to dive into a feature list, because a lot of that is table stakes, but what really sets us apart is our philosophy. We have the explicit goal of making our customers not only more secure but also more productive. Find me a Vault customer that would describe their install as helping them move faster!

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#7
This is great! I tried to use Vault and it just was a nightmare to get started (they seem to have improved now, in their defense). The more impressive thing here is that it democratizes access to safe env var/secret management by not requiring a devops background to understand how this works (Vault docs have a whole ton of newly coined terms which you must understand in order to use this, which was just too much for me—a self-taught web developer)

Kudos to the team for the launch! this is a beautiful product that solves a real problem in an elegant way!

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#8
post #6

Sounds interesting, but could you explain to me why I should use this over something like Azure KeyVault?

There are two immediate reasons. The first is so that you can manage your secrets and env vars in the same way in development as you do in production. Engineers focus a lot on doing this for code, but this hasn't hit the env var space yet. The second is so that all your secrets live in one place. Doppler is your source of truth for secrets in the same way that GitHub is your source of truth for your code. Your developers pull from GitHub, Azure pulls from GitHub during a deployment, etc. This centralization allows for really smooth access controls and auditing.

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#9
Congrats on the launch. Great to see more products in this space.

I'm also familiar (but never used) Envkey, which I think might also be from the YC alumni? but I'm not sure...

Shameless plug: I created an open-source tool called envwarden[0], which is really just a simple wrapper around the Bitwarden[1] CLI (also open-source). envwarden helps you manage your server secrets and other variables inside your Bitwarden password manager.

Definitely not as polished as neither Doppler nor Envkey, but just another (open) alternative I guess :)

[0] https://github.com/envwarden/envwarden

[1] https://bitwarden.com/

Re: Launch HN: Doppler (YC W19) – Easily manage your env vars and secrets

#10

Congrats on the launch. Great to see more products in this space. I'm also familiar (but never used) Envkey, which I think might also be from the YC alumni? but I'm not sure... Shameless plug: I created an open-source tool called envwarden[0], which is really just a simple wrapper around the Bitwarden[1] CLI (also open-source). envwarden helps you manage your server secrets and other variables inside your Bitwarden p…

That is awesome, I love seeing contributions in this space!
Post reply on HN